I am totally focussed now on learning spoken PT and I am concentrating completely on listening comprehension now, I am specifically focused on spoken PT as it is in Lisbon as this is where I spend my of my time.
I have been working through various shorties and ran into this passive vs active structures, I find the passive confusing sometimes, not specifically the shorties, just in general as it sometimes feels backwards and yoda like sometimes…this may simply because I unconsciously focused on active voices mostly and my brain hasn’t adjusted fully to passive yet.
It seems most sentences/ phrases can take the active or passive form… and after arguing with ChatGPT as I do often (I need therapy I know), it has informed me that for spoken PT just focus mainly on active… this is much more common…
So it raised a couple of questions, does that mean the shorties are not specifically focused on real world spoken and hence we will see a mixture of active and passive to cover all the bases…
Second is ChatGPT right about most spoken being in the active voice, or do I need to go back an argue with AI and tell it the people at Practice PT said you are wrong and an employment killer…
I think that the use of the passive voice is one area that PP needs extra material. Although the passive voice comes up from time to time, there isn’t a dedicated resource (that I’ve found). A unit on when and how the passive voice is deployed would be welcome.
@dbuachalla, yes, the active voice is dominant, but you still need to be familiar with the passive voice that will pop up every now and then. Most sentences can be converted from one to the other, and Portuguese and English are aligned in terms of passive voice structure and use. For example:
A Ana vendeu a casa. → Ana sold the house. (active voice)
A casa foi vendida pela Ana. → The house was sold by Ana. (passive voice, with auxiliary verb to be + past participle of main verb, and object/recipient of the action converted into grammatical subject)
The passive voice takes focus away from the performer of the action and puts it on the action itself. The performer of the action can even be fully omitted - going back to the example above, you could very well just say A casa foi vendida.
A unit on the passive voice is on our list for future content, but without an exact timeline at the moment.
@Joseph A sentence in my review stack is: Hoje esperam-se temperaturas abaixo de zero. I suspect this of being literally “temperatures expect themselves”. The PP translation is “temperatures are expected”, so I think this is not passive in Portuguese, but passive in English. There are numerous other options for the English translation (it is expected…you can expect…we expect) in both voices. As you are doubtless aware, people can get very excited about passive sentences in English where an active option exists, and which is considered correct has changed in the relatively recent past.
So, as an English speaker who has been made paranoid about the use of the passive tense I’d like to say that it is hoped that more guidance on the Portuguese use of the passive will be forthcoming in due course.
@coljay, you’re welcome. Please note that the sentence you mentioned can be passive in Portuguese as well and the pronoun ‘-se’ is kind of a stand-in for that (it has a passivating use in this context). It’s not reflexive, since the subject, which is actually absent here, is not the same as the object.
Hoje esperam-se temperaturas abaixo de zero. = Hoje são esperadas temperaturas abaixo de zero. (lit. “Today, temperatures below zero are expected”)
The foreseen unit on the passive voice will cover the passivating use of ‘-se’.